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Blockrise restructures pricing: clients pay for service, not for holding

• Blockrise removes the percentage-based custody fee across all account types.
• The change separates ownership from service in Blockrise's pricing model.
• Clients now only pay for services used; ie. brokerage, lending, asset management, not for holding bitcoin.

Rotterdam, 10 June 2026, Blockrise, a Bitcoin platform supervised by the Dutch Authority for the Financial Markets (AFM) under MiCAR, announced its custody fee will be reduced to 0% across all accounts.

A percentage-based custody fee is the industry standard, with numbers reaching up to 1% per annum. The fee scales with the value of a client's position, regardless of activity or service used. Blockrise reviewed that model against the operational reality of custody: the work of securing a wallet is the same whether a client holds 1 BTC or 100 BTC. The analysis led to the clear conclusion that percentage-based pricing belongs to categories of financial services where fees scale with complexity and effort. Bitcoin custody is not such a service, whereas charging a relative custody fee misaligns platform incentives with the long time preference bitcoin holders are trying to exercise.

Going forward, Blockrise now only charges clients for services that genuinely scale with effort: purchasing bitcoin, asset management mandates, bespoke services and Bitcoin-backed loans through Blockrise Lending B.V. This change makes Blockrise one of the first Bitcoin custodians where clients are charged no custody fee for simply holding bitcoin, directly competing with various crypto custody providers and other crypto platforms.

Blockrise states to support long-term growth of Bitcoin positions. Jos Lazet, Founder and CEO at Blockrise, mentioned "We want our incentives on the same side as our clients' time horizon. We earn when we do something for the client, through trades, lending or asset management, and not just because their position grew while nothing changed on our side.”

"The bitcoin's value proposition is built on low time preference," said Johan Dourleijn Bitcoin Strategy Advisor at Blockrise. "A fee structure that grows with conviction runs counter to that. At Blockrise, we built our wallet structure differently, which forces us to reinvent how we price. Each client holds their own segregated wallet, true to Bitcoin's original idea of be your own bank. That is nothing like traditional banking or fintech, and it changes what we should charge for: ownership is yours and verifiable on-chain, so the right model is to charge for service, not for holding."

Blockrise is working towards a broader repricing that separates ownership from service across its full product range, as the company recently added bank accounts to its product portfolio. The custody fee removal is merely a first step in the direction of becoming the leading Bitcoin-only company in the European Union.

About Blockrise

Blockrise is a Bitcoin-only platform based in Rotterdam, on a mission to make bitcoin accessible without compromising what makes it valuable. Founded in 2017, it offers trading, asset management, and Bitcoin-backed loans through Blockrise Lending BV, through a hybrid custody model that gives clients full ownership of their bitcoin. Regulated by the Dutch Authority for the Financial Markets (AFM) under MiCAR, Blockrise serves individuals and businesses across Europe. Visit www.blockrise.com.

For interview requests and more information: Jos Lazet, Founder and CEO Blockrise, j.lazet@blockrise.com, +31 10 848 1741

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• The partnership’s goal is to offer users Bitcoin-friendly bank accounts.

• Blockrise is the first business to leverage bunq’s Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) offer.

• bunq’s BaaS is the first of its kind, enabling companies to build upon bunq’s open API.
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Amsterdam, 29 April 2026 - bunq, Europe’s second-largest neobank, announced its partnership with Dutch Bitcoin platform Blockrise as part of bunq’s new Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) offering. Blockrise is the first business to leverage bunq’s platform, which integrates the neobank’s secure and regulated financial infrastructure directly into a business’s own products to improve user experience.
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Starting in the Netherlands, the collaboration enables Blockrise users to instantly access Bitcoin services with embedded bank accounts. All fiat deposits are protected up to €100,000 by the Dutch Deposit Guarantee Scheme through bunq’s European banking license, ensuring user trust and security.
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A first in the banking industry, bunq’s BaaS platform enables companies to build upon bunq’s open API, leveraging its security and speed. The service will help provide users with better, safer products by handling complex compliance and security requirements so they can innovate faster.
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“Up to now, Dutch Bitcoin users had to choose between security and convenience. With bunq's infrastructure, they get both - a bank account that works seamlessly with Bitcoin, protected by the Dutch Deposit Guarantee Scheme,” said Jos Lazet, Founder and CEO of Blockrise. “We are proud to be the first-ever Bitcoin platform that is able to offer full bank accounts to our clients.”
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“For over a decade, bunq’s mission has been to make life easy for our users. Now, we're taking that mission even broader," said Joe Wilson, Chief Evangelist at bunq. “By partnering with innovators like Blockrise, we empower them to build products that match their users’ wants and needs in a trusted and secure platform. This is how we help more people across Europe: by working with an exclusive group of like minded fintechs to create incredible user experiences.”
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About bunq

bunq, Europe’s second-largest neobank, has rebuilt banking from the ground up. As the world’s first GenAI-powered bank, bunq’s proprietary AI powers every part of the business, from helping users with their finances, to being baked into bunq’s own operations. By developing a product rooted in its users’ wants and needs, bunq makes life easy for location-independent people and businesses, starting from the way they manage money: how they spend, save, budget and invest.

Pioneering many things considered impossible, bunq was the first bank to get a European banking permit in over 35 years, raised the largest series A round ever secured by a European fintech (€193 million), and was the first EU neobank to achieve structural profitability. As part of its mission to build the first global neobank, in October 2025 bunq also took its first step into the US as an approved broker-dealer, with more  expansion to follow. Learn more: www.bunq.com.

About Blockrise

Blockrise is a Bitcoin-only platform based in Rotterdam, on a mission to make bitcoin accessible without compromising what makes it valuable. Founded in 2017, it offers trading, asset management, and Bitcoin-backed loans through a hybrid custody model that gives clients full ownership of their bitcoin. Regulated by the Dutch Authority for the Financial Markets (AFM) under MiCAR, Blockrise serves individuals and businesses across Europe. Visit www.blockrise.com.

Bitcoin-backed lending has grown into a multibillion-dollar market, yet the question of how much collateral a lender needs across Bitcoin market cycles has never been empirically tested with a decade of daily data.

The Loan-to-Value ratio (LTV) represents the loan amount as a percentage of the Bitcoin collateral posted.

This paper stress-tests daily loan originations from January 2016 to March 2026 across four LTV tiers, measuring the worst-case outcome over each loan's full term.

At a 20% origination LTV, only 1.2% of 12-month loans were liquidated, compared to 36.1% at 60% LTV.
A Monte Carlo simulation of 10,000 Bitcoin price paths shows liquidation probability rising from 3.8% at 20% LTV to 43.3% at 60% LTV.

Historical survival curves show that to protect 95% of all past originations, a lender would need to cap initial LTV at 28.5% for 12-month loans and 23.9% for 24-month loans, both below thresholds commonly used in the industry today.

The gap is 34.9 percentage points

The results are stark. At a 20% origination LTV, only 1.2% of 12-month loans across 3,355 originations are liquidated over the entire dataset. At 60% LTV, that figure reaches 36.1% — a difference driven entirely by how much buffer exists when Bitcoin prices fall. The survival of a Bitcoin-backed loan is primarily dependent on one number: the LTV at origination.

What the data makes clear is that the distinction is not that 60% LTV performs badly in crashes, it fails broadly across regimes. The 2018 crypto winter, COVID in March 2020, the Luna collapse, the FTX crash: each event tells a different story about the 60% LTV tier. Meanwhile, 20% LTV only fails in the most extreme events, when Bitcoin drops more than 76.5% from origination within the loan term.

"36.1% of all 12-month loans originated at 60% LTV were liquidated between January 2016 and March 2025, compared to just 1.2% at 20% LTV. The LTV at origination determines nearly everything."

The 2021 cohort sharpens the point. For loans originated at 60% LTV heading into the 2022 bear market, the liquidation rate through that single cycle reached 82.7%, compared to 0% at 20% LTV. The same period, different LTV, entirely different outcomes.ƒ

At 28.5%, 95% of all 12-month loans survived every historical Bitcoin market regime from 2016 to 2026.

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How low does the LTV need to be?

Historical survival curves across all regimes from 2016 to 2026 draw a clean line. To protect 95% of all past loan originations, a lender would need to cap initial LTV at 28.5% for 12-month loans and 23.9% for 24-month loans, both below the thresholds commonly used in the industry. The 90% survival threshold eases the requirement to 33.5% and 28.5% respectively.

Notably, the consistent gap between 12-month and 24-month loan survival explains the same phenomenon seen across loan durations: a longer term creates more opportunities for the loan to cross the liquidation threshold. Yet at 20% LTV, the difference between a 12-month and 24-month term adds just 0.21 percentage points of additional liquidation risk — suggesting that at this level of collateral, loan duration becomes almost irrelevant. The dominant variable is the collateral level, not the duration

Risk does not grow in a straight line

A Monte Carlo simulation of 10,000 Bitcoin price paths over a 5-year horizon reinforces and extends the historical findings. At a 20% origination LTV, a loan faces a 3.8% chance of liquidation over five years. At 60% LTV, that figure climbs to 43.3%. The increase is not linear.

Moving from 20% to 30% LTV adds about 5.7 percentage points of liquidation risk over five years. Moving from 50% to 60% LTV adds nearly 14.8 percentage points for the same 10-point increase. The efficiency frontier divides naturally into three zones: a Safe zone below 30%, a Caution zone between 30% and 50%, and a Danger zone above 50%. In the Danger zone, borrowers are penalised disproportionately for every additional percentage point of leverage, while the upper end of the LTV range offers little meaningful protection relative to the risk taken on.

What this means for lenders

The research makes a case that Bitcoin-backed lending is not inherently risky, it is structurally risky when initial LTV levels are set without reference to the full distribution of Bitcoin price behaviour across cycles. A 30% LTV ceiling, currently considered conservative by industry standards, still leaves a lender exposed to meaningful liquidation risk across longer time horizons. The data suggests that a structurally safe threshold sits closer to 25%.

Download the full research paper.

Blockrise™ is a trademark of Blockrise Capital B.V. in the Netherlands and other countries. Blockrise Capital B.V. is a private limited liability company registered in the Netherlands, under Chamber of Commerce number 74879782. Blockrise Capital B.V. holds a MiCAR licence with number 41000029, issued by the Dutch Authority for the Financial Markets (AFM). Blockrise Lending B.V. is a group company and does not hold a MiCAR-license.